


If Music Be the Food of Love, There's Chinese in the Fridge

by MJ (mjr91)



Category: Dresden Files (TV)
Genre: Crack, Guitar, M/M, Music, crackfic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-04-30
Updated: 2012-04-30
Packaged: 2017-11-04 15:08:21
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,753
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/395206
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mjr91/pseuds/MJ
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Bob's been away a lot lately, and Harry's been worried.  Is there a need for it?</p>
            </blockquote>





	If Music Be the Food of Love, There's Chinese in the Fridge

**Author's Note:**

> This is kind of personal crack because I had this sudden vision of Bob sitting on the floor playing a guitar. I was finishing up from a bad day in court and the vision was supposed to comfort me but all it did was induce fic explaining it.
> 
> All songs are actual Elizabethan songs, I promise.

Harry Dresden was not a happy man. He should have been, he thought, as he placed the order for take-out Chinese food. He ordered for two, optimistic – perhaps Bob would be home tonight, as he had not been most nights for several weeks.

When Mai had finally decided, admittedly under pressure and under a new debt to Bob for saving her neck, to undo the curse that had been placed upon him centuries before, Harry had imagined… well, to be fair, he didn't know what he'd expected, but it hadn't been this.

Working with Bob was one thing. That went well, surely. And as for sex… well, that was something that made Harry blush simply thinking about it, because… insatiable? Incredible? Whatever word chosen had to suggest that Bob was making up for lost time both in quantity and quality. The morning after their first night together, Harry had been unable to get out of bed – and Bob had merely considered that to be the incentive for another round much like the previous night's lovemaking.

But for all his professions of love, of mad passion, what have you, Harry admitted to himself while ordering the kung pao shrimp, Bob wasn't spending much, if any, non-work time at home now, and he'd only had physical substance again for less than three months. If they weren't hard at work, or if they weren't in bed, Bob didn't seem to want to be around. He was gone all evening, sometimes until after Harry had gone to bed. It hurt, because it was certainly leaving Harry feeling as if he didn't mean much more to Bob, now human again, than money and sex.

The shrimp, an order of lo mein, an order of General Tso's chicken, egg rolls, and hot and sour soup went into a large bag that Harry threw into the Jeep, not particularly wanting to think if Bob would be home for dinner or not. Bob had been hoarding money as well as disappearing for hours after five o'clock, and what he was doing with it, the gods only knew. Presumably he was finding food when he was out doing… whatever. And whatever… who knew if it involved women. It was probably preposterous of Harry to presume that Bob's alleged love for him excluded an equal interest in the opposite sex; after all, there had been Winnifred, and Bob had always been so interested in the details of Harry's luckier dates. And what woman could possibly turn down a lean body, deep green eyes, white hair, and a silver tongue? None that Harry knew – that much was sure.

He pulled up to his building, fortunately finding a parking space in front of it. The front room was dark, but that didn't mean much, nor did the door being locked. There would be no way to know whether Bob was in until Harry was inside.

He unlocked the door, carrying in his bag of treasure, and was immediately perplexed as he closed the door behind himself. His stereo system, which was a piece of crap at best anyway, never worked – one of the drawbacks of wizardry. Had Bob bought a new system? There was music coming from further back, something classical, which seemed like the sort of thing that Bob might listen to. Strings, or plucked strings, not a piano, and someone singing something he couldn't make out. It was pretty, Harry thought, but it was completely unrecognizable.

"Bob?"

There was no answer.

Harry placed the bag of Chinese food on a counter as he made his way to the next room. What he found was not a new stereo system at all.

Bob sat on the floor, legs crossed, illumined by candles, without his jacket or ascot, his sleeves turned up. Resting on one leg, and reaching up to and past his hand, was a guitar unlike anything Harry recognized. It was smaller than most, and certainly wasn't electric. It had a delicately filigreed carving that covered its sound hole, and an elaborately carved head stock. Whatever it was, it was not a Fender or Gibson, and it wasn't a Martin, either. Those were the only guitars Harry actually knew, and it didn't fit any of their definitions. Bob was playing it – well – and was singing, more or less to himself, light from the candles playing on the lines of his face.

" As Vesta was from Latmos hill descending  
She spied a maiden Queen the same ascending,  
Attended on by all the shepherds’ swain;  
To whom Diana’s darlings came running down amain  
First two by two, then three by three together  
Leaving their Goddess all alone, hasted thither;  
And mingling with the shepherds of her train,  
With mirthful tunes her presence did entertain.  
Then sang the shepherds and nymphs of Diana:  
Long live fair Oriana!"

Harry leaned against the door frame as Bob sang, apparently unheeding of Harry's presence, waiting for him to finish.

"Bob?"

The singer turned his head toward Harry, and looked up, smiling. He waved a hand at Harry, bidding him to come closer; Harry walked into the room and sat down on the carpet across from Bob, watching him. Bob closed his eyes, moved his hand back to the guitar's neck, and began singing once more. 

"My love bound me with a kiss  
That I should no longer stay.  
When I felt so sweet a bliss,  
I had less power to part away.  
Alas, alas, alas, that women doth not know  
Kisses makes men loath to go. 

“Yes, she knows it but too well,  
For I heard when Venus' dove  
In her ear did softy tell  
That kisses were the seals of love.  
O muse, O muse, O muse not then though it be so,  
Kisses makes men loath to go.

“Wherefore did she thus inflame  
My desires, heat my blood,  
Instantly to quench the same,  
And starve whom she had given food?   
Ay, ay, ay, the common sense can show   
Kisses makes men loath to go." 

Harry watched Bob, fascinated, as he played. When Bob finished, he smiled and laid the guitar in his lap. "I'm only practicing," he told Harry. 

"I had no idea…" 

Bob laughed lightly. "When I was a boy, it was expected that everyone of good family could play an instrument. I was fairly capable with a lute and a few other stringed instruments. This," he said, cradling the antique guitar, "is as close as I can come to any instruments I remember. I found it at the antiques shop where we had to exorcise the French Provincial armoire." 

Harry blinked in surprise. "Oh, yeah, I remember that one." The case was hard to forget, for that matter. The armoire had objected strongly to its owners placing contemporary music electronics in it, causing it to throw its own French Revolution over what it considered abuse. Harry had wondered why it complained about American rock, considering the state of modern French music.

"It was a bit harder tracking down an instructor to refresh me on a Renaissance musical instrument, but there is a music professor at the university who does give lessons. I've been studying with her twice a week until I felt comfortable with one of these again."  
"So, what you're singing… it's period music?"

Bob nodded, running his hand along the guitar's curves almost as if he were running it across a lover. "During the reigns of Henry and Elizabeth, there was a great deal of excellent songwriting. Henry himself was a very fine composer and performer, I'm told, though I never heard him perform, of course." 

"Play for me?"

"That's the idea, love. I wanted to surprise you with this."

"I'm surprised… I'm surprised… play me something else." Harry slid down further, lying with his head against Bob's leg. Bob smiled fondly at Harry and re-seated the guitar in his lap, singing again with a strong, clear baritone that Harry had never imagined.

"Did man thus love as I?   
I think I was made, I think I was made,  
I think I was made   
For no other trade,   
My mind doth it so hard apply,   
And all fond courses,  
and all fond courses else doth fly. 

“Undoing were a petty care,  
Loosing my best hopes, loosing my best hopes,  
loosing my best hopes  
In their largest scopes.  
Two loving when I do compare,  
Methinks I could,  
methinks I could as trifles spare."

Bob ended the song some notes later, laying the guitar back on his lap with great care and looking over at his lover. “Would something else please you, my love?”

“Hmm...” Harry pretended to think. “You know anything by Metallica?” 

There was a sniff conveying decided insult. “I don’t believe so, and I don’t intend to learn it. I’ll have you know that Dr. Morgenstern asked me if I wanted to play in a local Renaissance music group. She had never met anyone who knew the music as well as I do. As, of course, I should. I haven’t answered her yet, but the idea is quite tempting.”

“I don’t know,” Harry replied. “I’m not sure I want those wild classical music audiences throwing themselves all over you when you sing madrigals to them.”

“Madrigals,” Bob sighed heavily, “are, unless transcribed, a multiple-singer performance. Unless you are suggesting that I would be the John Lennon of Renaissance music performances, I’m highly unlikely to be the object of unbridled lust from an intelligent audience.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” Harry said, moving his head to the top of Bob’s thigh and using it as a pillow. “You’re the object of my unbridled lust at the moment.”

“As I said, Harry, an intelligent audience, not an insatiable one.”

“I think I’ve been insulted.”

“No,” Bob laughed, “I just know what’s on your mind at the moment.” He ran his hand through Harry’s hair.

“Is food on yours?” Harry asked. “I have a bag of Chinese take-out in the other room.”

“I think dinner can wait,” Bob said, hand once again in Harry’s hair. “It’s said, however, that music is the food of love.”

“Is it?” Harry inquired. “I knew I was hungry.” He thrust up a hand, extinguishing most of the candles, and then curled up against Bob contentedly. “If you don’t know any Metallica, I’ll take more of whatever.”

Bob lifted the guitar from his lap once more, sighing deeply and acting as if he were highly put out, although his voice betrayed him completely. “If I must, dear boy; if I must.”


End file.
